The Limits of Genocide: An Attempt at a Credibility Interval on the Khmer-Rouge Death Toll

Extant estimates of the number of deaths that resulted from the Khmer-Rouge ruling of Cambodia range from half a million to over three million excess deaths--a huge range considering that the country's total population size was about 8 million at the outset of the Khmer-Rouge regime. In this presentation, I describe this unsatisfactory range and investigate whether it can be narrowed with either new data or a better approach. I introduce three new sources of data and discuss uses of the demographic reconstruction method, which several researchers have already applied to this estimation problem. In particular, I explore the uncertainty inherent to the estimates derived by this method and suggest using it in a stochastic framework to generate a distribution of death toll estimates and credibility intervals around the median or "best" estimate.